Doing some learning around Azure Notification hubs and trying to understand one of the basic concepts but not able to find any documentation that states it explictly.
Is an azure notification hb able to send a push notification directly or does it have to have a third party set up in its settings (ie APNS, GCM.FCM, WNS, MPNS,ADM, Baidu)?
Azure Notification Hubs (ANH) must be configured with credentials for one or more of the push notification services (PNS) that you've enumerated.
Essentially, each of these providers have a reliable mechanism for delivering a specific notification to a specific device, some of them also provide mechanisms for delivering the same notification to many devices. But those solutions are usually limited to just their platform.
ANH seeks to provide a wrapper for each PNS that provides routing and scale to target many devices with a single request, so that you don't need to write that code separately for each platform. Using more advanced techniques, like templates, can even allow you to abstract away platform differences altogether.
However, ANH is not an alternative to the PNSs you've listed. I hope that helps.